Lost (in) Music

When Brian Matthew used to do "Sounds of the 60s" he'd get communications similar to "my husband's favourite record is XXXX, could you play it because he has never heard it since 1967 when it went missing in a house move" and more recent Chris Hawkins has a Lost Love feature where people write in with messages akin to "My favourite record as a teenager was XXXX but I haven't heard it since 1990".

Now the thing is we live in a digital age and we can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world instantly if we are both, in some form , online. A benefit of this is that you can usually easily find your favourite record. This blog relies so much on Youtube because you can find virtually everything on there, if I can't find it I will create a slideshow and put the record up there and hope it doesn't get pulled for copyright reasons. Most of them stay and you can check my channel which is a combination of such slideshows and live performances.

The other thing, even if you are not digitally connected, if you are lucky and have one , libraries and record shops can search out music for you, and they would be on the end of a phone. The people who contact Chris Hawkins have no excuse at all, they contact him exclusively by email so are connected.

In the nineties Voiceprint Records based in Houghton-Le-Spring re-released a lot of music digitally. This was a good model because the music was only downloadable so apart from the server and site costs they didn't have to invest in vinyl / cd print runs. There is still music on th eimprint (see below).The problem with digital media is it can be stolen over and over again that applies to video, music and e-publications.

So I should really play a song I have forgotten about, but if I've forgotten about it then I can't remember it so I will just play something that I haven't played for a while, although I want't to also play something fairly obscure which I had difficulty tracking down, but I did on either Amazon or Ebay. That song is "Dizz Knee Land" by Dada from 1992 and it is a great record.The title of the song spelling was changed by the group so as not to interfere with copyright laws, however "Disneyland" is also the nickname for the Orange County Jail.

2112

Actually this is post 2113, the last one here was 2112. I only realised as I was getting towards the end of it and it was all about my eye infection. 2112 was an album by Rush and was pretentious as hell but I always equated Rush with Abba, music generally awesome but lyrics were sometimes very iffy. Abba had the excuse of English being a second language but Rush didn't.

It didn't stop Rush producing some great music and when they reigned back their pretentious side everything was excellent, but even the pretentious stuff , the music still more than stands up. The first song I heard by them was "Finding My Way" from "Fly By Night" on the John Peel show and thought it was Led Zeppelin, they were that good. I must have heard their early albums because I didn't actually by them and generally they were patchy in my opinion, but  the live "All The World's A Stage" changed that which is a live tour-de-force and that was the first Rush album that I bought.

I actually sang "Spirit of Radio" with Spoon and always have difficulty singing rubbish lyrics, "Spirit of Radio" has excellent lyrics, but I don't think I have a recording anywhere of that to see how good or bad I was.

So I really have to included "2112" that took up side one of the album it named. Great music and dodgy lyrics for this Friday.

Eyes Adrift

On Sunday I noticed my left contact lens was a bit curly at the edges but still put it in anyway. By the afternoon my left eye was stinging and I took my lenses out and had to bathe it as it had become very uncomfortable to the point of being painful. Monday and Tuesday I wore my glasses for work and my eye seemed to be better although the aircon at work does dry the eyes out a bit,

Wednesday morning I walked to work ( you can see some of that on Instagram here) with contact lenses back in but when I got into work suddenly I could hardly see out of my left eye and it was also affecting my right eye as well. I ditched the left eye contact lens but was feeling awful and disorientated and got myself back home. At 11:45 I rang C4 Sightcare , my opticians of 20 years, told them the problem, my left eye felt like it was filled with grit or sand, and they asked if I could get it by 12:15 which I said I could. By this time the sun was shining and due to Blackett Street being closed for the Christmas Market I had to walk a fair way to the opticians but I could hardly see due to the bright sunlight and the discomfort in my left eye and nearly walked into a few people.

My optician examined my eye and said the cornea was cloudy, but there was no major problems, although the pressure jets were painful, and prescribed me some GoldenEye Antibiotic Cream. I went home and slept for 5 hours and today has been much the same but the eye in improving. I will probably do without contact lenses over the weekend, although I don't like wearing glasses all day.

So when Kurt Cobain died Dave Grohl formed the Foo Fighters, but bassist Krist Novoselic formed Eyes Adrift who I think only made one album which featured a beautiful song called "Inquiring Minds" which I have found a live acoustic version of  but click on the title for the album version, or buy it from the link below. This is possibly the first paragraph I have written that mentions every member of Nirvana.

You can see that my eye is improving because I can actually write a blog post, so things are improving.

A Record - Godbluff

This is post 317 this year, that surpasses last year's total of 316, so any more posts this year will just cement 2019 as my most prolific posting year ever. I have no need to actually surpass that, and this year I wasn't actually trying to surpass last year, but I just did.

This, for some reason reminded me of "Godbluff" by Van Der Graaf Generator, another of my favourite albums, which consists of four songs and is an incredibly atmospheric album punctuated by Peter Hamill's staccato stabbing words and vocals. The NME reviewed it favourably but commented that it needed a format that allowed it to be played non stop (this was mid seventies, 1975). Obviously CD facilitated this but there was the option of recording it to one side of a C90 cassette or if you were posh a cassette player that had autoreverse. Classical music had the same problem, but I play vinyl now and don't mind turning the record over, and also think that twenty minutes is a fine length to listen to a piece of music.

I found a copy of the album, so you can also listen to it non stop now thanks to digital technology or you can buy it on the link below.

This morning I was getting my weekly tablets, and one of the things is that tablets have their own boxes and colour scheme. This morning I notices that my Metformin have changed from a blue compact box to a green long box, the same a s Doxazosin. I had mistakenly pulled out some new Metformin instead of Doxazosin. Now I know we are resistant to change, even when it benefits us, but this is not a good change, I could have been double dosing on Metformin and not getting Doxazosin. Now I spotted it but there may be many who don't do this. I think I may go to chemist and feed this back, you can see here. on my Instagram feed.

It's minus 3 degrees centigrade, cars are iced up, so will be a cold walk to work.

Dry Your Eyes

Over the last two day I noticed the contact lens for my left eye  seemed a bit ruffled round part of the edge and slightly stung when I put them in. Yesterday when I took it out my eye was hurting as though it was was either scratched or there was something under the eyelid scratching it that was moving about.

Also when I was trying to read the eye was was blurry , not looking good.

After much bathing with a warm cloth the eye has calmed down but still seems very dry. On Saturday I would have tried to get my contact lenses in, but even though it's a work day I am going with glasses even though they give me a slight headache if I wear them for more than a few hours, but it will give my left eye a rest.

So really this is an excuse to play another of my favourite songs which I have shared before, but it is worth hearing again, The Streets (Mike Skinner) and "Dry Your Eyes"

In The Middle Of The Night ...

Sometimes you just wake up and feel you want to do something. I can't concentrate enough to read read, and I can't really pick up an instrument an play because it makes noise and disturbs others, I can't put a record on ar watch TV because when I feel like this it's not a headphones moment, so I find that writing I blog post can satisfy the need to do something vaguely creative and run my mind down a bit so I can then slip back to bed and get some sleep.

It is now five am on Sunday morning, but middle of the night can be any time between going to bed and getting up. It's black outside the window, but not particularly cold so I didn't have to get dressed to write this (but I'm sure you didn't really need to know that) but it is also very peaceful.

This week I will hit my annual record for blog posts which will be 317 (this is post 315 and last year I posted 316 times) . That's like 17 posts every 20 days or 26 posts a month which is fairly close to being daily, although some days I have done multiple posts (like yesterday).. I should actually try to see if I can do a lot of posts in a day, although I don't think it would be possible because all these posts are on the fly  about things that interest me, rather than to hit a target, although if a target is achievable I am often tempted towards it.

So I am starting to feel a little tired so I think we simply go for "In The Midnight Hour" by Wilson Pickett and I found this great performance by him and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform "In the Midnight Hour" at the 1999 Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, when Bruce Springsteen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A Handkerchief

We hear so much about recycling these days yet still get our milk in plastic or cardboard disposable cartons and use paper tissues instead of handkerchiefs  and when we see  that we need to sort our rubbish into separate containers so that things can be recycled, I think if we reused things there would be little need to recycle thing. Things would be built to last.

I used to work on a farm and bottled milk which was delivered to customers, and went it was delivered the used bottles were returned and then reused. The only disposable part of the operation was the disposable aluminium foil tops.

Now we use disposable paper tissues when I clean handkerchief feels good to touch , and after use can be washed and reused for a long time. I used to like having a handkerchief although you do need somewhere to put it and keep it, but we are generally good at things like that.

Similarly with nappies / diapers, again washing and reusing saves the need to recycle create landfill.

I think a perfect song for this is "Recycled Vinyl Blues" by Neil Innes written at the time of the early seventies oil crisis when vintl prices went up , but also saw the advent of the 12" single, as if 7" wasn't enough.

So just a few thoughts on recycling when we should be reusung.